Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Kurze Einführung in das Werk Voegelins

Kurzinhalt: Realität bestimmt d. Bewusstsein, anamnetische Meditation, Entfaltung der Symbole der göttlichen Präsenz in Richtung Transzendenz, from compactness to differentiation, Dornbusch

Textausschnitt: Voegelin finds consciousness, the concrete consciousness ... to be first of all constituted by reality. Even though the consciousness will be shown to have an important role in what we may call the 'co-constitution' of reality, the primacy lies with the always prior forming reality. This prior reality, in which Voegelin found his consciousness already moving and by which it was already structured, opened up, in the questioning search provoked by that reality's movement in himself, to the mystery that Voegelin called 'the Beginning and the Beyond,' following the language of the constitutive history he recovered in his own work-opened up to the mystery, in a word, of 'what men call 'God'.
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The 'history' that Voegelin remembers in anamnetic meditation ... is the history of divine presence and its manifestation in human consciousness. Voegelin makes modern ... the great foundational experiences and symbolizations of divine presence, the great movements of consciousness toward 'transcendence' in the directions of the Beginning and the Beyond, ...
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The movement of reality in human experience, in personal autobiography as well as in the larger history of societies of persons, goes from compactness to differentiation of experience and is always accompanied by the struggle of imaginative symbolization to express adequately the emerging differentiation. For Voegelin, this movement from compactness to differentiation is primarily the movement in which the mystery of the divine formative presence in the whole of reality deepens into the mystery of the divine Beyond of its moments of presence. This differentiation of the 'Beyond' is inseparable from the corresponding differentiation of the concrete consciousness ...
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The concrete, reflecting consciousness finds itself in emphatic partnership with a divine Beyond that reveals itself precisely by drawing the participant consciousness beyond itself in its experienced presence of the movement of 'revelation' toward a beyond of revelation.

Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Imagination u. reflektive Distanz; Balance, Differenzierung des Bewusstseins = Vertiefung göttl. Offenbarung

Kurzinhalt: imaginative stories; Distanz zw. Mensch und Gott: Notwendigkeit der Imagination, "Balance" oder magische Selbst-Schöpfung; Dichter als Rivale Gottes

Textausschnitt: 1) The imagination and its imaginative story (myth) - as the necessary and irreplaceable way of speaking of the mystery. And this story is always the expression of faith.
(2) Reflective distance ... as the human correlate of the divine Beyond.
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... the further differentiation of the consciousness ... is the correlate of the deepening mystery of the divine Beyond in the same differentiating process.
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With the later writings it becomes most clear that the human partner's response to the divine movement must be an imaginative one in trying to find appropriate symbols for what is happening in reality to the partners as each moves deeper into mystery in the growing intimacy of growing distance in the differentiating movement. The divine becomes more 'unknown' just as the human becomes more a mystery to itself.
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As this movement proceeds, the greatest skill is required of the human imagination to keep the balance so as not to sever the tie that binds divine and human in the movement. Here, then, in reflective distance of consciousness, the human storyteller is most godlike, most the 'image of God.' And here, too, he can enter into his greatest rivalry with God, ... The image of reality and its movement that the human partner creates in response to the divine movement in his soul can maintain the balance, or it can fall away into the imaginary world of magical self-creation and self-salvation,

Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: paradoxe Struktur des Bewusstseins: Intentionalität (Thing-reality), Luminosität (It-Reality); Wahrheit

Kurzinhalt: The Structure of Consciousness, gemeinsame Struktur des Bewusstseins, Wahrheit als (Aspekt) Luminosität der Realität in Erfahrung und Imagination, Partizipation; 'balance', 'reflective distance'

Textausschnitt: () The common structure Voegelin exemplifies in Genesis 1 will be found in and applied to Plato and his Timaeus, Hesiod and his Theogony, and even Hegel and his Phenomenology.
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With the common structure gained, we can penetrate to what is common in the dominant images of reality that emerged from the great visions and their stories: the images of order coming out of disorder in cosmological myth and ritual ...
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Especially the emphasis on imagination links back to my desire to present Voegelin as the philosopher of divine presence in everyman, for surely everyman experiences himself as imagining.
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At the heart of Voegelin's presentation of the structure of consciousness is what he calls 'the paradox of consciousness ...
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On the one hand we speak of consciousness as a something located in human beings in their bodily existence. In relation to this concretely embodied consciousness, reality assumes the position of an object intended. ... thingness
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On the other hand, we know the bodily located consciousness to be also real; and this concretely located consciousness does not belong to another genus of reality, but is part of the same reality that has moved, in its relation to man's consciousness, into the position of a thing-reality.
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... two structures of consciousness named 'intentionality' and 'luminosity,' and two corresponding structures of reality dubbed 'thing-reality' and 'It-reality,' will be used to great effect in the rest of Volume V to explicate and explore the tensional nature of reality in its movement toward order
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For the truth of reality is not an ultimate piece of information given to an outside observer but reality itself becoming luminous in the events of experience and imaginative symbolization. Truth is a perspective of reality, arising from man's participation, with his conscious existence, in the reality of which he is a part. Hence, ...
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Of intentionality and mystery, we shall speak as 'structures' of consciousness. With the caution, however, that they are not fixtures of a human consciousness in the immanentist sense, perhaps an a priori structure, but moving forces in the process of reality becoming luminous.
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Voegelin moves next from these first two structures to the third, which he names here 'the balance of consciousness' or 'wisdom' and, in the fifth volume, 'reflective distance.' 'The forces of intentionality and mystery are neither speculative assumptions, nor do they operate as a blind a priori. They are experienced as the moving forces of consciousness. [...] Hence, the process of reality becoming luminous is further structured by the consciousness of the two moving forces, of the tensions between them, and of the responsibility to keep their movements in such balance that the image resulting from their interactions will not distort the truth of reality'

Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Imagination; von d. partizipatorische Erfahrung (It-reality) zum Symbol, imaginative perversion

Kurzinhalt: balance, Wahrheit, Symbole als Antwort auf den Apell d. Realität, Mensch als kreativer Partner, Traum der Allmacht; von d. sich enthüllenden Realität -> (falsche) Wahrheit, die d. Realität bestimmt; Faust

Textausschnitt: Voegelin introduces at this point 'the neutral force' of imagination which can either aid in the balance or produce imbalanced images of reality. 'A thinker must remain aware of his consciousness as permanently engaged in balancing the structuring forces, in the personal, social, and historical dimensions of the process. ... but is a neutral force inasmuch as it can also produce imbalanced and distorted images of reality'
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Truth has its reality in the symbols engendered by the quest. [...] The symbols [...] arise from the human response to the appeal of reality, and the response is burdened with its character as an event in the reality to which it responds.
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At this point it will be helpful to introduce the term 'imagination' into the analysis. The event, we may say, is imaginative in the sense that man can find his way from his participatory experience of reality to its expression through symbols. [...] There is no truth symbolized without man's imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality ... Through the imaginative power of man the It-reality moves imaginatively toward its truth.
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By virtue of his imaginative responsiveness man is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth; and this creatively formative force is exposed to deformative perversion, if the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth.
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The distance inherent in the metaleptic tension can be obscured by letting the reality that reveals itself in imaginative truth imaginatively dissolve into a truth that reveals reality.
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'The imaginative perversion of participatory imagination into an autonomously creative power,' Voegelin goes on, 'has remained a constant in history.

Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: das "Alles" d. Realität wird durchsichtig für seine Wahrheit durch: Imagination u. reflexive Suche

Kurzinhalt: periechon, 'All' of reality, It-reality, fides quaerens intellectum, Interaktion zw. It-reality u. Luminosität; Bedeutung d. Imagination

Textausschnitt: What I want to emphasize for the sake of the topic of 'religion' in Voegelin is that the comprehending reality, Voegelin's It-reality, ... becomes aware of itself as part of the greater, comprehending reality that is not a 'thing' like the consciousness or the other 'things' consciousness intends, but is the 'All' of reality becoming luminous for its truth in the imaginative symbolizations of the consciousness in its reflective search.
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This emphasis on the interaction and inseparability of It-reality and thing-reality, of the luminosity of consciousness and its intentionality in the participatory paradox of reality and consciousness, and especially on the role of the imagination in symbolizing the movements in the complex of tensions, is, I think, the key point for our discussion of Voegelin's significance for the modern mind. For the imaginative interaction he describes includes a much wider horizon than what is usually included under the Christian symbolism of fides quaerens intellectum.

Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Timäus, Spannung zw. It-reality - thing-reality; Seele - Mythos

Kurzinhalt: Plato, Timaeus, Paulus; platonischer - paulinischer Mythos; Mythos: Primärerfahrung + Erfahrung d. Seele + pistis; Symbol: Seele, Kosmos;

Textausschnitt: () The Timeaus exploration most fully illustrates Voegelin's paradoxic tension of consciousness, of It-reality and thing-reality, and the central role of the imaginative psyche within the process of reality and the telling of its story. The core of the Timaeus myth, the Platonic philosopher's myth par excellence, illuminates the consciousness and story of the twentieth-century philosopher Voegelin ...
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The philosopher discovers that the myth is the ineluctable instrument for communicating the experience of the soul; for he must himself develop mythical symbols in order to express his discovery both as a process and as a result. And through the opposition of his conscious myth to the less conscious forms he becomes aware that the old myth also expresses the truth of the soul, merely on a less differentiated level of consciousness. The soul as the creator of the myth, and the myth as the symbolism of the soul, is the center of the philosophy of order. That center, the philosophy of the myth, is reached by Plato in Timaeus. (OH III, 170)
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The Timaeus marks an epoch in the history of mankind in so far as in this work the psyche has reached the critical consciousness of the methods by which it symbolizes its own experiences. As a consequence, no philosophy of order and symbols can be adequate unless the Platonic philosophy of the myth has been substantially absorbed into its own principles.'
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When Plato tried to characterize the type of truth peculiar to the symbolism of the Timaeus he wavered between the more assertive alethinos logos and the more doubtful eikos mythos. But whether his myth of the Cosmos was a 'true story' or a 'likely myth,' he was sure that the symbolism had not been engendered through articulation of an experience. The anima mundi is a philosopher's myth: It articulates neither the experience of the primordial field, nor the experience of the psyche, but achieves the imaginative fusion of insights gained by the two types of experience separately. ... Still, the imaginative play has its hard core of reality as it is motivated by man's trust (pistis) in reality as intelligibly ordered, as a Cosmos. ... the trust in the underlying oneness of reality, its coherence, lastingness, constancy of structure, order and intelligibility will inspire the creation of images which express the ordered wholeness sensed in the depth.
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The most important of these images is the symbol cosmos itself, whose development runs historically parallel with that of the symbol psyche.

Autor: Caringella, Paul

Buch: Eric Voegelins's Significance for the Modern Mind

Titel: Voegelin: Philosopher of Devine Presence

Stichwort: Voegelin's Timaeus, das umfassende All u. seine Manifestation in der imaginativen noetischen Seele

Kurzinhalt: Kosmos als It-reality - Seele; pull - counterpull; (to pan); monosis - monogenes; Kosmos of Public Unconscious;

Textausschnitt: What emerges from Voegelin's 'final' Timaeus reading in Volume V is the 'Image of the Image.' The imagining teller of the tale, Plato, through the speaker of the table, Timaeus, finds the structure of the Cosmos as the It-reality moving through all things to the ultimate paradigmatic oneness. But the 'place' of its movement ... is the imaginative noetic psyche of the questioner for the Beginning and the Beyond.
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It is in the soul of the 'thing' man that the struggle between It-reality and thing-reality goes on, symbolized as the pull of the Beyond and the resistant counterpull of the chora - the divine, immortal Beyond and the 'mortal beyond.'
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the encompassing All, the to pan of reality (Voegelin's It-reality) - experienced by us as an Eikon, an Image, as the only-born, monogenes, image of the invisible oneness (monosis) of the eternal living Paradigm-Reality. The noetic quest of the embodied soul, ... is the place where the cosmos becomes luminous for its paradigmatic order, but this only through the ordering force of persuasion, of peitho, working on the receptive-resistant force of the non-thing chora, 'Space.' This Myth of the Cosmos, which, Voegelin says, is not a cos-mological myth, is Plato's exposition of his Fides, the report of his fides quaerens intellectum.
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Through Voegelin's Timaeus analysis we can get some sense of the central role of everyman's consciousness and unconsciousness, of everyman's imaginative power to form and deform images of reality, to remember and forget, to fall back into the oblivion of the dominant cosmos of the Public Unconscious